It's not that I hate Joyce, but reading him feels like a million monkeys to me. Just throw a lot of words on the page and something amongst them has to be good. I can understand the interest with allegory, metaphor, and allusion being so important to the writing, but so much of it is just so daft boring. It's something to study, not to actually sit and enjoy, unless of course one is an English Literature major. I'm not. That's probably where the disconnect is. I plead guilt of ignorance and will go back to reading cereal boxes.

It's not that I hate Joyce, but reading him feels like a million monkeys to me. Just throw a lot of words on the page and something amongst them has to be good. I can understand the interest with allegory, metaphor, and allusion being so important to the writing, but so much of it is just so daft boring. It's something to study, not to actually sit and enjoy, unless of course one is an English Literature major. I'm not. That's probably where the disconnect is. I plead guilt of ignorance and will go back to reading cereal boxes.

I think your criticism is quite justified in Finnegan's Wake which is so loaded with allusively heavy language as to be almost incomprehensible. But in The Dubliners Joyce creates a series of dark, often poignant portraits of Dublin life. The longest, "The Dead" is in some ways an elegiac study of the end of an era and a culture. One thing about them, though, is that the stories while gritty and pessimistic do have a kind of wisdom that comes from a deep perception of the human condition.

The portraits may not be very pleasant but they are beautifully written, accessible and worth exploring {eventually }.